And if you go through that three step questioning process,
you’ll get to the truth of what you truly want to pursue
and stop yourselves from building a sandcastle, which the waves of time will eventually wash away.
If we spent a lifetime living someone else's life, how do we in our 30s or our 20s or our 40s or 50s,
how do we just decide, “oh, I'm going to start finding out
what my life is?” So where do we start?
One of my favorite ways to start is looking at what we value.
And values are a very intangible word, and so there's a very
easy way to figure out what you value. There's two things you have to look at.
You look at how you spend your money. The most painful thing you can possibly do,
go through your bank statement and look at where your money is
being spent, that is what you value. The other thing that we spend,
just like we spend money, is how we spend our time.
Those are the two most perfect ways to see what you currently value,
your value isn't what's in your head,
isn't what's in your heart, isn't what's in your mind,
it's how you spend your money and how you spend your time.
So the question we have to ask ourselves is, “where am I currently spending my time,
and where do I want to spend it?” Now studies also show
that everyone has to go to work, so this isn't about what you do for work.
People who had more meaningful, purposeful lives and were healthier, wealthier and wise
invested their time in education over entertainment.
The smartest, the wealthiest, the most healthiest, the wisest people in the world
were reading books, watching documentaries, taking courses, listening to podcasts,
learning to better themselves. And so that's the first place to start.
The second place when we look at that value order, is I want you to write down three things
that you're currently pursuing in life. It might be a promotion, it might be a new home,
whatever it is, whatever it is that you are currently pursuing.
And then I want you to ask this question, is that your desire and your dream
or is it coming from something outside of you, is it coming from a pressure of a family member?
Is it coming from an expectation because your friend just bought something?
Where is that desire truly coming from? And the third and final question
you want to ask yourself is, “do I still want to pursue that,
or do I want to change how I pursue it, or do I not want to pursue it at all?”
And if you go through that three step questioning process,
you’ll get to the truth of what you truly want to pursue
and stop yourselves from building a sandcastle which the waves of time will eventually wash away.
And this is where you will find, you know, you will hear a friend
or someone, you know, say, “you know, I really value
loyalty and I really don't like gossip”. And then you find out that that person
was gossiping about you. And how does that feel?
It completely feels like someone's broken your trust.
And so often the way we see ourselves or want to see ourselves
is amplified compared to how we actually behave. So we'll spot something and there's a
beautiful story that I share in the book, and there's lots of these across the book.
But there's these old ancient Indian and Zen stories
and there's this story of the evil king that goes to meet a good king.
So the evil king, goes to the castle,
the quarters of the good king and the good king being a good king
invites the evil king inside for some dinner.
They sit down, the service brings out the plates,
the plates are placed in front of the evil king and the good king,
and they're just about to eat, and as just about as they're about to eat,
the evil king switches the plates. And the good king goes,
“what is going on, is that some ceremony in your time,
why are we doing this?” And the evil king goes,
“well, I don't know, you might have poisoned my food”.
“You might be trying to kill me, you might have poisoned it”.
And the good king bursts out laughing, he is like, “really like, come on,
I've invited you over for dinner”. “This is my team, you know, whatever it is,
let's start eating right now”. And just about he's about to eat.
The evil king swaps it back again and the good king goes,
“well now what then?”. And he goes, “well,
I don't know, you might be double bluffing me”. And that night the evil king doesn't eat,
the good king happily eats his plate. The point is that so often we think
we don't have some of the mistakes that we make, but we see them and everyone else,
we see those mistakes in other people so we say, “oh, this person's not doing this right or,
I don't like the way he or she talks to that person”.
But if we really do an audit in ourselves we will realize
that we have a lot of those same challenges and feelings
that we may think others have. And so for me, it's sometimes really
scary and daunting task to do that values audit. But it truly, truly is a beautiful process that
we all need to go through to really realign our
map and get our compass right and start moving in the right direction.